Mosquito researchers may have hatched a new plan to control the bloodsuckers: Break their eggshells.

A protein called eggshell organizing factor 1, or EOF1, is necessary for some mosquito species’ eggs and embryos to develop properly, a new study finds. Genetically disrupting production of that protein in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes caused about 60 percent of their normally dark eggshells...

For the first time, researchers have created mice with two dads. No female contributed to the rodents’ genetic makeup.

This unusual reproduction took place in a lab where researchers gathered fathers’ stem cells, and used them to produce embryos that were implanted into surrogate mothers. The technique required scientists to edit the animals’ genes in order for the mice to mature enough...

A new microscope is giving researchers an unprecedented view of how mammals are built, cell by cell.

Light sheet microscopes use ultrathin laser beams to illuminate sections of a specimen while cameras record those lit-up sections. Previous iterations of the device have captured detailed portraits of living zebra fish and fruit fly embryos as they develop. Kate McDole, a developmental...

Think of tissues as mosh pits of cells. The cells may not be able to crowd surf, but they can jam.

Specifically, cells can undergo a jamming transition, a physical role change that was previously known to occur only among foams, sand and other nonliving materials. It’s one of the ways that physicist Lisa Manning has shown how...

Assisted pregnancies give infertile couples the chance at a child. But kids conceived with reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF, were more likely to develop high blood pressure as adolescents than their naturally conceived counterparts, a new study finds.

Salamanders and lizards can both regrow their tails, but not to equal perfection.

While a regenerated salamander tail closely mimics the original, bone and all, a lizard’s replacement is filled with cartilage and lacks nerve cells. That contrast is due to differences between stem cells in the animals’ spinal cords, researchers report online August 13 in Proceedings of the National...

Scientists now know how long it takes for a cell to tell itself it’s time to die.

Signals triggering a type of cell suicide called apoptosis move through a cell like a wave, traveling at a rate of 30 micrometers per minute, Stanford University systems biologists Xianrui Cheng and James Ferrell Jr. report in the Aug. 10 Science.

Babies exposed to a Zika infection while in the womb are not out of the woods even if they look healthy at birth.

Nearly 1 in 10 of 1,450 babies examined developed neurological or developmental problems, such as seizures, hearing loss, impaired vision or difficulty crawling, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. It’s the first tally of the health of...

Toastier nest temperatures, rather than sex chromosomes, turn baby turtles female. Now, a genetic explanation for how temperature determines turtles’ sex is emerging: Scientists have identified a temperature-responsive gene that sets turtle embryos on a path to being either male or female. When researchers dialed down that gene early in development, turtle embryos incubating at the cooler...